Mrican coast-do you know, do you know?" ' ything you can tell us, please, anything at all." Kiran Patel had sold beads to tour- ists in the Bombay hotel district for most of a centuf)T. She said that there were fewer and fewer travellers to her part of the world, but that this hardly mat- tered, since there was less and less of her part of the world for them to see. The ivory beads she had peddled as a young woman became scarce, then rare, then finally unobtainable. The only re- maining elephants were caged away in the zoos of other countries In the years just before she died, the "genuine ivory beads" she sold were actually a cream-colored plastic made in batches of ten thousand in Korean factories. This, too, hardly mattered. The tourists who stopped at her kiosk cowd never detect the dIfference. Jeffrey Fallon, sixteen and from Park Falls, Wisconsin, said that the fighting hadn't spread in from the coasts yet, but that the germs had, and he was living proof "Or not living, maybe, but still proo " he corrected himself The bad guys used to be Pakistan, and then they were Argentina and Turkey, and after that he had lost track. "What do you want me to tell you?" he asked, shrug- ging his showders. "Mostly I just miss my girlfriend." Her name was Tracey Tipton, and she did this thing with his earlobes and the notched edge of her front teeth that made his entire body go taut and buzz like a guitar string. He had never given his earlobes a second thought until the day she took them be- tween her lips, but now that he was dead he thought of nothing else. Who wowd have figured? The man who spent hours riding up and down the escalators in the Ginza Street Shopping Mall wowd not give his name. When people asked him what he remembered about the time before he died, he wowd only nod vigorously; clap his hands together, and say, "Boom!," making a gesture like falling confetti with his fingertips. T he great steel-and-polymer build- ings at the heart of the city, with their shining glass windows reflecting every gap between every cloud in the sky; gave way after a few hundred blocks to buildings of stone and brick and wood. The change was so gradual, though, and the streets so :fiill of motion, that you could walk for hours before you realized that the architecture had trans- formed itself around you. The sidewalks were lined with movie theatres, gymna- siums, hardware stores, karaoke bars, basketball courts, and falafel stands. There were libraries and tobacconists. There were lingerie shops and dry clean- ers. There were hundreds of churches in the city-hundreds, in fact, in every dis- trict-pagodas, mosques, chapels, and synagogues. They stood sandwiched be- tween vegetable markets and video- rental stores, sending their crosses, domes, and minarets high into the air. Some of the dead, it was true, threw aside their old religions, disgusted that the afterlife, this so-called great beyond, was not what their lifetime of worship had promised them. But for every person who lost his faith there was someone else who held fast to it, and someone else again who adopted it. The simple truth was that nobody knew what wowd happen to them after their time in the city came to an end, and just because you had died without meeting your God was no reason to assume that you wowdn't one da This was the philosophy of J osé Tamayo, who offered himself once a week as a custodian to the Church of the Sacred Heart. Every Sunday, he waited by the west door until the final service was over and the crowd had dissolved back into the city, and then he swept the tile floor, polished the pews and the altar, and vacuumed the cushions by the Communion rail. When he was fin- ished, he climbed carefully down the seventeen steps in front of the build- ing, where the blind man stood talking about his journey through the desert, and made his way across the street to his apartment. He had damaged his knee once during a soccer match, and ever since then he felt a tiny exploding star of pain above the joint whenever he extended his leg. The injury had not gone away; even after the crossing, and he did not like to walk too far on it. This was why he had chosen to work for the Church of the Sacred Heart: it was the closest church he cowd find. He had, in fact, been raised a lVlethodist, in the only non-Catholic congregation in Juan Tula. He frequently thought of the time he stole a six-pack of soda from the church storage closet with the boys in his Sunday-school class. They had heard the teacher coming and shut the door, and a thin ray of light had come slanting through the jamb, illuminating the handle of a cart filled with folding chairs-forty or fifty of them, stacked together in a long, tight interdigitation. What José remembered was staring at this cart and listening to his teacher's footsteps as the bubbles of soda played over the surface of his tongue, sparking ". I II ". ' '::'" . :' . . ; .-., .. ,. ." ,;:;:. ----- . w, f\ i 4f : ,",' f1 è. .....". Shc7\n ,/l "It followed me home. Can I domesticate it?"